Why does 'Cleveland, Yorkshire' appear as a census place when it shouldn't?
Lately I've noticed that 'Cleveland, Yorkshire' is appearing in search results when I'm looking for people in the censuses of England and Wales.
For example, a couple of times here: https://www.familysearch.org/search/record/results?count=20&f.recordType=3&q.birthLikeDate.from=1841&q.birthLikeDate.to=1851&q.birthLikePlace=faxfleet%2C%20yorkshire&q.givenName=emmaline&q.recordCountry=England&q.surname=wilman
But when I view the individual records there's (correctly) no mention of Cleveland. It looks like the event place is incorrect somewhere.
Answers
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That is a good observation. Dewsbury and Cleveland are in different areas of Yorkshire. As you indicated, the records don't mention Cleveland, so they are still accurate. I don't know where the mention of Cleveland came from.
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I see several instances of the reference to Cleveland in the England and Wales Census 1871, but they are most often shown a birth places. I see that one from the page that you reference is the census location.
Unfortunately, we are no longer able to view the original census record, so it becomes doubly hard to determine why Cleveland shows up, unless it was an error in indexing. Although we do see auto-standardization problems for place names, I don't see anything in the index record to indicate that this is an instance of that problem
In case you may be doing a lot of research in England and Wales, I provide the following statement from N. Tychonievich, "If you have extensive ancestry in England and Wales, it might be worth your while (and money) to subscribe to findmypast.com where you can access the census records." You may also find her complete post of interest.
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The two examples that can be seen on the page for which the link is provided both relate to the 1851 census. As we can see, there is no reference to Cleveland anywhere else in the records, so this is very strange. If there is a FamilySearch team that has specific responsibility for E&W census collections, perhaps you could escalate the issue to them for investigation. As, I believe, these records come across from Find My Past, it would be interesting to see if they appear this way on the FMP website, too. (I do not have an LDS account / FMP subscription, so I cannot check myself.)
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I don't think this error is specific to this census. Here's a thread reporting the same behavior (wrong place in search results, no sign of it on individual index entry) in Zimbabwe: https://community.familysearch.org/en/discussion/119825/pretoria-maputo-mozambique#latest
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Thank you for reporting this “Search Results shows inaccurate place, but record details page shows it correctly” problem. Your report has been forwarded to the engineers for further investigation and correction.
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@Caringandsharing, here's another thread about the same behavior: https://community.familysearch.org/en/discussion/comment/436276#Comment_436276
My theory is that this is a subset of the much broader autostandardization flustercluck.
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